The US Department of Justice wants tech companies to trust the government.

[Semicolon]

DOJ: Companies need to trust gov't on cybersecurity

The U.S. fight against cybercrime would be more effective if companies put more trust in the country's law enforcement agencies, a top U.S. Department of Justice official said.

The DOJ and private companies already cooperate on many cybercrime investigations, but more trust is still needed, said Leslie Caldwell, assistant attorney general with the DOJ's Criminal Division.

"There's a tendency among the public, including private-sector technology companies, to a little bit conflate what the Criminal Division does with what other government agencies might do," Caldwell said Tuesday during a forum on cybersecurity in Washington, D.C.

Revelations over the past year and a half of U.S. National Security Agency surveillance have caused "an erosion of trust and a kind of a demonization" of the government, she said. Investigations by the DOJ's Criminal Division require search warrants and other court supervision, Caldwell added.

"I would like to see a little more feeling of trust" from private companies, she said, when asked how companies can help with cybersecurity investigations.

In addition to more trust, more engagement from private companies is needed, added Joe Demarest, assistant director of the Cyber Division at the FBI.

Leslie Caldwell, assistant attorney general with the DOJ's Criminal Division

But calls by DOJ officials for legislation to require mobile phone operating systems to include back doors in newly announced encryption tools may be a major stumbling block to additional cooperation. In recent months, FBI Director James Comey called on Congress to rewrite the 20-year-old Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to allow for law enforcement agencies to access encrypted data on smartphones.

Comey has raised concerns about law enforcement access to criminal evidence on smartphones after Apple and Google both announced encryption tools for their mobile operating systems. Caldwell, on Tuesday, repeated those concerns.

Smartphone encryption probably "hasn't affected that many cases yet," but it's likely to become a problem for law enforcement, she said. "We really need to think long and hard about whether we want to create a zone of lawlessness that law enforcement can't access," Caldwell said. "I think that's a very dangerous precedent that's been set."

But Dean Garfield, CEO of tech trade group the Information Technology Industry Council, said the tech industry will oppose efforts to pass a law requiring a back door in encryption tools. Such regulations would be "incredibly disruptive in a negative way," he said.

The decision to encrypt smartphone data is new and "largely driven by consumer choice," Garfield said at the same cybersecurity event. "It would be a mistake to have technology-specific regulation that's trying prohibit something that, from my perspective, has limited value and impact on national security," he added.

Source

[RageBeoulve]

Gubmint: "Ayyy lmao make it easier for us to spy aight?"

Phone makers: "Suck my cock man. I want to sell this shit. XD"

[Semicolon]

FBI blasts Apple, Google for locking police out of phones

FBI Director James B. Comey sharply criticized Apple and Google on Thursday for developing forms of smartphone encryption so secure that law enforcement officials cannot easily gain access to information stored on the devices — even when they have valid search warrants.

His comments were the most forceful yet from a top government official but echo a chorus of denunciation from law enforcement officials nationwide. Police have said that the ability to search photos, messages and Web histories on smartphones is essential to solving a range of serious crimes, including murder, child pornography and attempted terrorist attacks.

“There will come a day when it will matter a great deal to the lives of people . . . that we will be able to gain access” to such devices, Comey told reporters in a briefing. “I want to have that conversation [with companies responsible] before that day comes.”

Comey added that FBI officials already have made initial contact with the two companies, which announced their new smartphone encryption initiatives last week. He said he could not understand why companies would “market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”

Comey’s remarks followed news last week that Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 8, is so thoroughly encrypted that the company is unable to unlock iPhones or iPads for police. Google, meanwhile, is moving to an automatic form of encryption for its newest version of Android operating system that the company also will not be able to unlock, though it will take longer for that new feature to reach most consumers.

Both companies declined to comment on Comey’s remarks. Apple has said that its new encryption is not intended to specifically hinder law enforcement but to improve device security against any potential intruder.

For detectives working a tough case, few types of evidence are more revealing than a smartphone. Call logs, instant messages and location records can link a suspect to a crime precisely when and where it occurred. And a surprising number of criminals, police say, like to take selfies posing with accomplices — and often the loot they stole together.

But the era of easy law enforcement access to smartphones may be drawing to a close as courts and tech companies erect new barriers to police searches of popular electronic devices. The result, say law enforcement officials, legal experts and forensic analysts, is that more and more seized smartphones will end up as little more than shiny paperweights, with potentially incriminating secrets locked inside forever.

The irony, some say, is that while the legal and technical changes are fueled by anger over reports of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, the consequences are being felt most heavily by police detectives, often armed with warrants certifying that a judge has found probable cause that a search of a smartphone will reveal evidence of a crime.

“The outrage is directed at warrantless mass surveillance, and this is a very different context. It’s searching a device with a warrant,” said Orin Kerr, a former Justice Department computer crimes lawyer who is now a professor at George Washington University.

Not all of the high-tech tools favored by police are in peril. They can still seek records of calls or texts from cellular carriers, eavesdrop on conversations and, based on the cell towers used, determine the general locations of suspects. Police can seek data backed up on remote cloud services, which increasingly keep copies of the data collected by smartphones. And the most sophisticated law enforcement agencies can deliver malicious software to phones capable of making them spy on users.

Yet the devices themselves are gradually moving beyond the reach of police in a range of circumstances, prompting ire from investigators. Frustration is running particularly high at Apple, which made the first announcement about new encryption and is moving much more swiftly than Google to get it into the hands of consumers.

“Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile,” said John J. Escalante, chief of detectives for Chicago’s police department. “The average pedophile at this point is probably thinking, I’ve got to get an Apple phone.”

The rising use of encryption is already taking a toll on the ability of law enforcement officials to collect evidence from smartphones. Apple in particular has been introducing tough new security measures for more than two years that have made it difficult for police armed with cracking software to break in. The new encryption is significantly tougher, experts say.

“There are some things you can do. There are some things the NSA can do. For the average mortal, I’d say they’re probably out of luck,” said Jonathan Zdziarski, a forensics researcher based in New Hampshire.

Los Angeles police Detective Brian Collins, who does forensics analysis for anti-gang and narcotics investigations, says he works on about 30 smartphones a month. And while he still can successfully crack into most of them, the percentage has been gradually shrinking — a trend he fears will only accelerate.

“I’ve been an investigator for almost 27 years,” Collins said, “It’s concerning that we’re beginning to go backwards with this technology.”

The new encryption initiatives by Apple and Google come after June’s Supreme Court ruling requiring police, in most circumstances, to get a search warrant before gathering data from a cellphone. The magistrate courts that typically issue search warrants, meanwhile, are more carefully scrutinizing requests amid the heightened privacy concerns that followed the NSA disclosures that began last year.

Civil liberties activists call this shift a necessary correction to the deterioration of personal privacy in the digital era — and especially since Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 inaugurated an era in which smartphones became remarkably intimate companions of people everywhere.

“Law enforcement has an enormous range of technical and old-fashioned methods to go after the perpetrators of real crime, and no amount of security effort at Silicon Valley tech companies is going to change that fact,” said Peter Eckersley, director of technology projects at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group based in San Francisco. “The reality is that if the FBI really wants to investigate someone, they have a spectacular arsenal of weapons.”

Sometimes, police say, that’s not enough.

Escalante, the Chicago chief of detectives, pointed to a case in which several men forced their way into the home of a retired officer in March and shot him in the face as his wife lay helplessly nearby. When the victim, Elmer Brown, 73, died two weeks later, city detectives working the case already were running low on useful leads.

But police got a break during a routine traffic stop in June, confiscating a Colt revolver that once belonged to Brown, police say. That led investigators to a Facebook post, made two days after the homicide, in which another man posed in a cellphone selfie with the same gun.

When police found the smartphone used for that picture, the case broke open, investigators say. Though the Android device was locked with a swipe code, a police forensics lab was able to defeat it to collect evidence; the underlying data was not encrypted. Three males, one of whom was a juvenile, eventually were arrested.

“You present them with a picture of themselves, taken with the gun, and it’s hard to deny it,” said Sgt. Richard Wiser, head of the Chicago violent crimes unit that investigated the case. “It played a huge role in this whole thing. As it was, it took six months to get them. Who knows how long it would have taken without this.”

Source

For reference.

[Parts]

    

[Icequeen]

Yes, we should all trust the government...they are only interested in our safety.

I also believe in Santa Claus and flying unicorns.

[Semicolon]

Yes, we should all trust the government...they are only interested in our safety.

I also believe in Santa Claus and flying unicorns.

I would feel secure letting the federal government handle my cybersecurity.

[Icequeen]

Yes, we should all trust the government...they are only interested in our safety.

I also believe in Santa Claus and flying unicorns.

I would feel secure letting the federal government handle my cybersecurity.

They can't even handle their own. How many times have they been hacked?

[Parts]

Yes, we should all trust the government...they are only interested in our safety.

I also believe in Santa Claus and flying unicorns.

I would feel secure letting the federal government handle my cybersecurity.

They can't even handle their own. How many times have they been hacked?

Sometimes I wonder if they let it happen on purpose to leak out disinformation but that might be too much of a complex task for them

[Arya Quinn]

[odeon]

[DirtDawg]

Holy fuck!!

I do not even know which constitutional amendment to quote here!

I'll just go with tits.

 

[Hannah]

Right right and I'm supposed to believe this mess? sure thing...*scratches boobs* Actually you know what is funny the Internet archive was invented by the government and now they wish they hadn't invented it...what with the way back machine and the like... I don't know weather to laugh or cry laughing...perhaps both

[Semicolon]

Right right and I'm supposed to believe this mess? sure thing...*scratches boobs* Actually you know what is funny the Internet archive was invented by the government and now they wish they hadn't invented it...what with the way back machine and the like... I don't know weather to laugh or cry laughing...perhaps both

Tor was originally developed by the government, too. Link

Or is it ?

[Arya Quinn]